Cloudy Blind Eyes
by Lor-tan
Summary: Argus Filch got his first pet when he was six. It was a cruel joke—an unmagical, useless puppy for an unmagical, useless boy—from his father for his birthday.


This story was written for The Houses Competition, Year 5, Round 3

House: Gryffindor

Class: Transfiguration

Category: Standard

Prompt: Argus Filch

Word count: 2,233, not counting authors note. Counting, it's 2,302.

Betas: White Eyebrow, whitetiger91

xXx

Argus Filch got his first pet when he was six. It was a cruel joke—an unmagical, useless puppy for an unmagical, useless boy—from his father for his birthday. It was his first gift that year, one of two, and everyone caught on quickly, and everyone but his mother laughed. He grit his teeth and pushed back angry-sad tears and pretended not to get it, pretended to laugh along unknowingly, but he'd heard enough jokes at his expense to understand them by now. He pretended to love the pathetic little puppy in his arms, with its sloppy short legs and cloudy blind eyes, but inside, he felt so angry and bitter and full of hate. He hated this, the laughter, his mother's pitying eyes, the little wriggly creature in his tense arms. How could something so young and fun represent something so hurtful?

The second present he received that year was from his mother. It was given later that night, when his family and all his father's friends weren't there to see it. She gave him a soft, sad kiss on his head, a tiny box in his hand, and told him to go off to bed. So, it was only when he was in his pajamas and his teeth brushed and the hated new pet was in bed beside him, trying to wander blindly off the edge, that he opened it. Beneath the white bow-topped lid of the box, was a tiny, doll-sized pink dog collar, still shrunk from when she'd bought it. She'd forgotten. Again.

He never got up the nerve to ask her to unshrink it. On one hand, it was nice that she had apparently forgotten why he was a blight on the family, but mostly it just hurt, and he didn't want to ask and remind her, even if he knew that even the "normal" children didn't know how to unshrink things without a wand. And he knew that his father would laugh at him if he asked. His father always laughed when he was reminded that his only son was a Squib and a failure. Argus thought that it was so he wouldn't get mad. Instead, he fished one of his mother's very old childhood bracelets out from a box in the part of the attic that he most often explored, and he put the painted leather monstrosity around the puppy's neck, and he named her Ivy, and then he tried to leave it at that. He knew he would have to keep her, because she was a gift and because it would amuse his father, but that did not mean that he'd have to like it.

Ivy, however, did not want to leave it at that. No matter how often he tried to shove her away and leave her fumbling through the halls of the house alone, no matter how he showed her only the coldest of attention—he only paid her enough attention to feed her and to let her into his room at night for goodness sake—she came right back, bumping into everything that crossed her path as she tried to keep up with him. She was like a curse that he was expected to love, a reminder of his lack of magic that followed him everywhere. He absolutely hated her, and everything that she was supposed to represent. He absolutely hated how she was determined to love him.

It wasn't long until, a few cruel jokes from his father and unintentional slip-ups from his mother later, Ivy managed to hunt him down while he was crying. He heard her nose bump against the door frame three times before she managed to find her way in, and then there she was, blindly staring up at him on the bed. The lower half of his face was buried in a satiny pillow, and his eyes were red, yet her tiny puppy body quivered with joy and excitement at having finally caught up to him, he who fed her and named her and was supposed to care for her.

He broke.

He snatched her up and held her close and cried into her fur that was just as satiny as the pillow; why did he have to be born like this? Why did she? Why did they have to be stuck in a world that couldn't care for them, or just didn't want to? It just wasn't fair...

It was within that one night of crying and muffled whispers and puppy kisses on teary cheeks, that she became the medicine to his pain when it sometimes seemed like his whole world was all just one big painful reminder of his fatal flaw. She was a warm furry presence that seemed to love him for a reason that neither he nor anyone else seemed to understand. She was just as unfortunate as him, and how could he hate her when instead they could be unfortunate and unmagical together, trapped together in the big lonely house his family lived in, where just a couple of rooms away dwelled a father who thought them a joke, and a mother who tried to love them, but didn't quite understand how?

They both needed this. He understood that now.

From then on, the only time she wasn't following after him was when he was already carrying her. He didn't just feed her anymore; instead, they ate together, her scarfing her share down first and then him lifting her up to sit in his lap while he finished his. She wasn't just in his room at night; no, now he slept with his limbs curled around her, half smothering her, and keeping her from moving and falling off the edge. She outgrew her leather collar and Argus got her newer, nicer ones, properly bought and un-shrank by his mother. She learned her name and came when called, and learned tricks like sitting on command and playing dead, although she was terribly stubborn about doing them sometimes. He developed the sense to hear her whining for something from clear across the house, and would race through the halls to get to her and make it better, even if he wasn't supposed to run inside. And no one even cared or interfered, not even his father, because if anything, this just made the joke funnier.

And Argus didn't even care anymore. He just wanted to take care of her, even if she was a mean joke at his expense. Ivy was becoming something terribly precious to him, a presence in his life who didn't look down on him or make fun of him or pity him, and he didn't have nearly enough things like that.

They grew up together, her into a short, sausage-shaped ball of silky hair with an increasingly stubborn attitude, and he into a gangly pre-teen boy with sore limbs and a temper that was permanently short, except with her. Oh, never with her. She was his best friend, and they could spend hours and hours going on walks or just lazing about in the library, stretching out on the thick carpet surrounded by magic books he couldn't read and Muggle novels his mother had added as he grew older. She nestled so neatly between his legs and was so pleasantly warm, sometimes they just fell asleep like that, sunlight streaming down on them from huge windows and drool dripping onto first editions of Muggle classics.

His teen years were a haze, as instead of going off to Hogwarts, he stayed home and learned sewing and financing with his mother, and helped her clean the big, empty house. At some point, she had apparently decided to cope with his lack of magic by simply removing it as much as possible from their lives. So brooms didn't sweep the hallways under a house elf's watchful eyes anymore; no, now they did it themselves. He had never known her to look more happy and beautiful than when she was in an old dress and her greying hair tied up, a triumphant smile on her laugh-lined face when they shined the fireplace mantle so well their faces reflected in it.

He wondered if his father, now barely even home anymore and more often at work, even noticed a difference when he came home tired and grumbling at night and his wife was the one who poured the tea. He wondered if he even noticed that Argus now always ate in the kitchens with a dog in his lap instead of with the rest of the family at the dinner table, or that all of the pillows in the sitting room were suddenly embroidered with little red dogs with floppy ears and dark noses. He wondered how much of a failure that all made him. But that didn't mean he stopped any of it. He felt almost pathetically happy, like a boy who'd finally found his place, and against all odds it had been right where he'd started out from.

He reached adulthood, and while most other boys were off getting jobs and falling in love, he stayed almost as though stuck in time, his days still spent between reading and cleaning the house. Ivy either wandered or sat prettily nearby, a sweet little red statue speckled with white, her posture old but proud, not unlike his mother. He was finding a lot of similarities between them nowadays. Whenever he'd finished sweeping or polishing or dusting or whatever it was, he'd just pick her old, age-stiffened body up and cradle her in his arms as he headed to the next room to start in the next chore.

His life was the soothing monotone of a young man twenty years old still living with his elderly parents, half because they needed it and half because he did. He spent a lot of time in front of the fireplace, reading aloud to soft furry ears that were slowly turning deaf with age. He began to contemplate how many senses Ivy had left to lose.

He never really thought to contemplate how many years she may have had left. He supposed that he got so used to her face being blushed with white, that he forgot what it meant. This meant he wasn't expecting it at all when he woke up one morning and the body his arms were wrapped around was cold. Why would he expect something like that? How could he? It wasn't even just a matter of reading the obvious signs of age and knowing that an unmagical animal of her size generally only lived a dozen or so years compared to a magical one. It was a matter of knowing that she could actually leave him, and the thought had never even crossed his mind in any other form than a vague "someday". He'd never even thought of being confronted with a "today". He got up slowly, and just observed her. All of her. The way her belly was cold, the way her legs were stiff. How when he picked her up to cradle her, her body felt rigid. The way her tongue peeked from her mouth and her eyes looked oddly textured, as if suddenly very dry.

He couldn't even make himself think. All he could do was hold her, and wonder when it had happened. At what precise moment during the night had he unknowingly failed her, and she had left him all alone? When had he missed the signs and allowed this to happen?

It was a feeling Filch would feel many more times over his life. He had two more dogs, before both of his parents died, both in the same miserable year. After that, somehow dogs just didn't feel right anymore. So he got a cat instead, a big black one with yellow eyes that stalked him through the house like some sort of evil guardian angel. It reminded him so perfectly of Ivy, and it made a smile appear on his face while at the same time it made his heart ache. When that one died, he got another, a tiny dust coloured kitten, and he sold his family home and got a smaller one, because what was the use of having a big house when it was only him and a cat? There was no hope in filling it, when no good witch would want to marry a Squib, and when he didn't have enough experience in the Muggle world to find a wife there. He wasn't even sure he wanted a wife; he didn't much like children.

After moving, he made a resume, or tried to at least, because he didn't like doing nothing all day and there was barely anything to clean in his new house. He'd left almost all of the good books behind when he'd moved, and he didn't know where his mother had gotten them in the first place, so it wasn't like he could have gotten any more. He wasn't entirely sure where to send his resume, so he just sent it anywhere that would take it. He figured that at least one place might take a Squib, just for manual labour. And he didn't really care what the job was, so long as he could have something to do and could bring the tiny kitten, Mrs. Norris, with him.

Then a few days later, a letter came back.

xXx

I realise that I have this mild obsession with dachshunds, but frankly I don't care enough to try getting rid of it.

Thank you for reading, and have a nice day! Byeeeeeeee!


End file.
